Sears' New Halloween Venture: Fright Wigs, Battle Scars

(MoneyWatch)  Piles of scary merchandise overseen by the nearly dead are nothing new for Sears. But making that impression on purpose? That's a switch.

Sears has opened 10 free-standing Totally Ghoul Halloween stores in suburban Chicago, loaded with party goods, decorations and costumes for all ages.

Joe Subleski, manager of the Totally Ghoul store in Crystal Lake, Ill., told the Northwest Herald that he stocks 3,000 to 5,000 items in a former Tweeter appliance store. The line is also sold at Kmart and on the Web; Subleski described it as more family-friendly than the "hard R-rated" stuff found at other stores.

At Sears.com, however, Halloween shoppers can spend $69.99 for a full-sized "road kill cadaver" (you could make a nice yard display with a Craftsman riding mower and some hand tools) or $89.99 for a "talking headless corpse with light sensor." Does it say "I'm sorry, that item is out of stock"?

Cornering the scary creepy stuff business every fall is Spirit of Halloween Superstores, a unit of Spencer Gifts which, since its acquisition in 1999, has expanded to more than 600 pop-up stores in 48 states.

Spirit of Halloween takes over abandoned big-box storefronts for about 60 days every fall, transforming old Lord & Taylor and Albertsons into one-stop shopping for French maid costumes, coffins, fake spiderwebs and ghost-shaped Peeps.

There's a metaphor here, but I won't belabor it.

Flickr image by Bill Rogers, CC 2.0